PATAS v3: customer-first validation and benchmark-gated build

[kiku-jw]

Result

Validate and sell one bounded PATAS historical spam-campaign audit before
building a new v3 runtime. The benchmark is the paid pilot's acceptance
contract, not a pre-customer implementation phase.

Context

• The durable product and architecture source is
  docs/v3/BRIEF.md.
• The current market, competitor, economic, data-access, technical, and
  anti-slop synthesis is
  docs/v3/research/README.md.
• The current Core is a reference baseline, not a clean production foundation.
• PATAS is historical pattern/control discovery; TAS remains the separate live
  filtering concept.

Decisions

• Conditional GO for a paid customer/data validation; NO-GO for a new v3 build
  until both gates pass.
• First-cohort hypothesis: a company-backed UGC/support operator with paid
  staff, recurring cross-message campaigns, an authorized abuse-plus-legitimate
  export, and a PostgreSQL-backed review/control surface.
• Founding money probe: a scoped $500 offline audit after metadata-only data
  preflight, with one frozen PostgreSQL replay adapter and no live integration.
• Exact, character, entity, and sparse methods are baselines. Dense semantics
  is a challenger and is removed if it adds no future-slice control yield.
• Rules remain typed, cited, replayed, and human-approved. No raw LLM SQL or
  automatic production enforcement.
• Data possession or de-identification alone does not establish processing
  rights; provenance, authorization, purpose, retention, and deletion are
  separate.

Acceptance

• Critical market, competitor, economics, data-access, technical, and
  adjacent-use-case research is published.
• Buyer qualification, fixed artifact contract, benchmark contract, and
  prospect/cohort kill rules are documented.
• At least 5 of 15 qualified operators confirm the owner-set pain threshold.
• At least 3 of 10 data-qualified prospects can provide usable authorized
  abuse and legitimate history with future replay coverage.
• At least 1 of 5 concrete paid founding-pilot offers is accepted.
• One paid pilot produces a deployed control or review shortcut with
  measured work reduction under the buyer's legitimate-error ceiling.
• Three customers share 70-80% of the pipeline and at least one wants a
  repeat audit before broader v3/platform work.

All numeric thresholds above are owner-set falsifiers, not market statistics.

Current handoff

• State: In Progress; customer validation is next, product implementation is gated.
• Outcome: The full critical research pack and independent adversarial corrections are published.
• Evidence: Commit f636f04, docs/v3/research/DECISION.md, and docs/v3/research/CORE-AND-BENCHMARK.md.
• Remaining: Verify current pain, buyer authority, SQL deployment fit, data retention/labels, and willingness to pay. No outreach has been sent.
• Next: After owner approval, run the bounded first-customer qualification and paid-offer sprint; record numeric evidence here.
• Gate: Do not implement v3 until a qualified operator makes a paid commitment and passes the usable-authorized-data gate.
• Source: PATAS-TAS/PATAS@f636f04 on main.

[kiku-jw]

The durable v3 brief and fresh-session handoff source are now published in commit 2e22f73.

Start with docs/v3/BRIEF.md. It records the reproduced v2 audit, settled PATAS/TAS boundaries, benchmark contract, research questions, phased v3 path, migration gates, and the exact first-session output.

The implementation gate remains: no production v3 service before a rights-cleared campaign-level benchmark and baseline comparison exist.

[kiku-jw]

Critical market and technical research is published in f636f04.

Verdict: conditional GO for customer/data validation; NO-GO for a new v3 build
until one qualified operator makes a paid commitment and passes the
usable-authorized-data gate. The research rejects generic anti-spam AI,
universal-platform positioning, and semantic-cluster-to-SQL shortcuts. It
freezes one PostgreSQL replay contract, makes cheap deterministic/lexical
methods the baseline, and treats semantics as a removable challenger.

The adversarial pass corrected the old build-first sequencing, separated
processing rights from sanitization, qualified current price/vendor claims,
split prospect disqualifiers from cohort kills, and reconciled the $500 money
probe with the larger benchmark. No customer outreach or data request was sent.

[kiku-jw]

The first-customer outreach roster is published in commit ad2e22b.

It names eight first-wave contacts across direct buyers and reusable platform channels, gives an official contact path and exact problem-specific first touch for each, and separates four boundary interviews plus explicit no-contact/skip cases. No public prospect is represented as ready for the $500 offer: every first message is a currentness or channel probe, and the paid offer remains gated on current workload, native-tool failure, an existing PostgreSQL-backed control path, retained abuse-plus-legitimate history, processing authority, and a budget owner.

The adversarial pass removed forbidden forum solicitation, reduced every first touch to one question and 50-80 words, and closed the first cohort against new plugins or platform-specific adapters. No customer outreach or data request was sent.